Why do so many new players not get the inventory system?

[Theresa Tennyson]

23 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

LL has the marketplace. They have direct delivery. Surely they could include the primary image in the marketplace listing as an image when the product is delivered in world? Directories aren't going to work with the generation that grew up with iphones and androids and only searching for stuff.

Making product images the responsibility of the vendor is never going to work. There are too many vendors who don't update old listings or aren't even in SL anymore. They could easily just include the primary product image in inventory when the product is delivered in world. It's too late for stuff that has already been delivered but this is something new users need, not existing ones.

For a large percentage of the Marketplace, that's only going to put a picture on a folder that contains a single boxed item that will create a different folder in the buyer's inventory when it's unpacked.

[Charlemagne Allen]

On 3/21/2024 at 10:23 AM, Theresa Tennyson said:

 

Okay, tough love time - are you sure you should be the person trying to explain things like this? Mesh bodies have been the de-facto standard for ten years; new people are automatically given them now too. I'm not sure it would be a good idea for a drivers' training teacher to be saying, "You know? Cars are weird. They're like mechanical horses."

I have a mesh body and head. I have helped dozens of noobs with Legacy classic and Lelutka head. I’ve also had people fighting with mesh bodies for hours because they just didn’t get it. Less technical people have trouble wrapping their head around it. It’s not fun for anyone.

Also, the “meme avs” are mesh freebies from the MP. So not ancient trash.

[SpiritSparrow Skydancer]

I still like to randomly attach boxes to my avatar, just to keep people on their toes and give them a giggle at why is she such a noob.

[Charlemagne Allen]

15 minutes ago, SpiritSparrow Skydancer said:

I still like to randomly attach boxes to my avatar, just to keep people on their toes and give them a giggle at why is she such a noob.

Lovely

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Look, the whole process of acquiring items for your avatar to wear is insane.

It draws from so many different sources...

For instance: as soon as LL comes up with some technical innovation, content creators turn it into fantastic things. However, that isn't always straightforward.

In the ancient days, LL thought that they could get away with merely having painted textures on top of avatars. Okay, so, well, people wanted to wear jackets over T-shirts over their underwear... so, LL introduced many 'clothing layers' and changed the viewer technology to pre-bake your avatar's 'whole texture' (actually, three — head, top, bottom) and send it to everybody else, as opposed to sending all the textures separately, and allow each viewer to bake it independently (which didn't work that well).

Then we started getting transparencies — of two different kinds. Then LL toyed with the idea of having materials (we had about a dozen or so) but abandoned the plan. By this time, people were already wearing prim shoes and prim hair — because you simply couldn't do anything very realistic by just painting textures over your body. Prim clothing brought a bit more tridimensionality to clothes, but it also meant that avatars were starting to wear things constantly, which was not quite what LL originally had in mind.

Obviously, I don't know what these ideas were, but you can get some hints from very early movies of SL. It's clear that "valid attachments" were things like weapons or a jetpack or any kind of discardable items, to be used in some sort of "experience" or "adventure" or "game" or... whatever... but not exactly something that was supposed to be permanent.

Still, that's what people started doing — 'permanent attachments' which were used, well, as part of your body or your clothing. Which, in turn, meant that you would now have items in your inventory that were yellow cubes but were not 'regular objects', but rather 'clothing' as well. That started to become... confusing.

And from there, we jump to flexiprims, to rigid sculpties, to mesh (in its many variants!), and, ironically, 'bake on mesh', which is sort of how it all began... but on a completely different avatar body!

All of that is now spread across over inventory, of course, and it's all small yellow cubes. You just need to figure out how to set them apart from, well, objects. It's a bit easier if you read & write English with some fluency, of course, since the vast majority of items will be labeled in English.

Okay. Now that's the positive part, so to speak: content creators incorporating new technology into their creations, and doing more and more things that LL never even remotely dreamed about.

Then we have the dark side.

These are all the very complex tricks that content creators have to come up with to deal with technical limitations imposed by LL — for whatever reason — and figure out ways of working around those limitations.

Here is an example: buying things. The way it was designed to work was simply to put your items inside a prim and set it to sell its contents on touch. Easy, right? The problem is that if you have dozens of items to sell — and each in different colours, too! — that's a lot of prims, and that's a lot of tier to be paid. Therefore, vendors became popular very early on, because you could just use 2-3 prims and let customers search through all your clothes.

Unlike selling a prim's content — which does not require any scripting at all — vendors are slightly more complex items. They need a bit of scripting to shuffle textures around and deliver the item currently selected after receiving a confirmation of payment. And here the problems start: while, script-wise, you do get a special event confirming that a payment was made, as well as showing up on your transaction logs, and you can then proceed to send an item to the buyer (because you know you've received payment!), you cannot know if the item was ever delivered.

In fact, once the item is sent to the buyer, you don't have any more information about what happened. The buyer might have crashed, and the payment went through — but they never received the item. Or they might have a very cluttered screen (most of us do), and fails to click on the dialogue box to accept the item (and it times out). Or you might simply click on the wrong button for whatever reason, cancelling the delivery. Or... well, you can see how tricky this is, so many things can go wrong.

All that could have been avoided if LL added just a line of code to confirm that someone received the item!

So, what did content creators do? They devised this two-step (and currently three-step) mechanism to guarantee that you really got the item. First, you receive a box, which started as being styled as a "gift box" which you dropped on the ground to unpack. Besides the cuteness of the experience, the important thing is that, once that gift box is rezzed, the script inside can immediately notify the merchant who sold it — they now know that their item was delivered, and was delivered to the right person, and they have it in their inventory (so, they can complain, but the merchant knows that they cannot complain that they didn't get anything!).

Dropping boxes on the ground meant owning your own land, or using a public sandbox, or, well, some very brave merchants even allowed customers to temporarily rezz their boxes on the floor of their shops — but, naturally enough, griefers immediately abused that, by bringing their scripted griefing tools with them and creating havoc. So — either you had your own place (and that meant you couldn't even test whatever you've bought until much later...), or you went to a public sandbox, avoiding griefers left and right, just to get your little item out of the box.

And at the end you'd get two yellow cubes in your inventory — one was the box, the other was the actual item you've bought. With luck, the content creator had thought well in advance and made it clear which is which. Some, however, just named the item inside with the same name as the gift box. Confusing. You'd delete the wrong one — or kept both, just in case, and were constantly attaching the box to your avatar's head, not the item you bought. So confusing!

Later, this was slightly improved with the "shop bag" kind of idea, i.e. instead of rezzing a prim, you'd attach the prim to your avatar. That works as well (and technically you can even use the same script for both cases, so if someone rezzed the handbag in a sandbox instead of attaching it, they would still be able to get the item inside), but with two catches. Some misguided content creators required the "shop bag" to be touched to activate it (as opposed to immediately sending you the item when you attached it). This is usually okay... unless the item gets wrongly attached somehow, and you cannot see where the bag is (maybe it's upside down, floating over your head or under your feet, or even rezzed inside your avatar's body). You might now need to be an expert in turning the camera around just so in order to find where exactly the bag is and touch it on where it's supposed to be touched (sometimes it's just part of the bag that can be touched... it all depends on the content creator's whim).

The second catch is that formerly you could just attach one item per attachment point, and that meant that if you were extremely unlucky with the choice of attachment points, you could wear the bag and lose your clothes — or part of them — and it wouldn't be immediately obvious what went wrong — or, worse, you might not even see what was 'displaced' by the bag and cannot remember what you had there before.

Not to mention that, on laggy areas, buyers might not see the box or bag being rezzed, and so rightfully complained to the merchant, who had a confirmation of delivery and therefore might not be very willing to replace the item (or perhaps have no time to answer technical support questions related to the user interface...).

Also... everybody would know what you have bought by just looking at the box or bag. That's fine if you buy a plain vanilla piece of clothing. But perhaps you're not that fond of showing off that you've just bought the latest 'sex toy' for your private dungeon. No privacy!

Confusing? Aye, quite so. It only gets worse, of course.

Content creators then realised that, in order to avoid boxes not being rezzed, the easiest way would be simply to send people a HUD, and — hopefully — add some short explanation of what to do with it (i.e. "wear me to unpack").

Cool — no more privacy issues for sure, and no need to worry about where that attachment went. But it also meant that, unless you know what to expect, all of a sudden you might get a huge prim blocking your view which you haven't a clue about (since content creators will use the highest-resolution textures they can, and that means these will take time to rezz — and be just a very blurry obstruction on your vision during that time). It might also displace one of your favourite HUDs, too, making things even more confusing.

But now the horrible mess really starts. Very early on, content creators figured out that if they placed scripts in their items, these could be used to enable lots of interesting things. For example, heels could be scripted to play sounds; clothes could change colour; bracelets could be resized without the need for selling them with modify permissions. That was cool in itself, but what was even cooler, was the ability to also script the items to inform the merchant that they weren't merely delivered (which you got from the HUD attachment), but actually used (which you got when attaching the bought item to your avatar). Not to mention, of course, whatever other metrics the merchant would be interested in — but let's not go that way!

Initially, those items would be programmed/configured using text chat commands — first in public chat (argh!), later on private channels — but they were sort of awkward to use (if I got L$1 for every time someone typed /ao on in public chat or even on group chat...). Content creators moved on to complex dialogue boxes instead, but, due to the extreme limitations (and awful aesthetics) of those, they quickly moved on to... HUDs.

HUDs, mind you, are a tribute to the imagination, creativity, and technical prowess of content creators. Most of them (and there are tons of varieties!) work really well, they work all the time with next-to-zero bugs, and they get more complex every day. Some have extensive manuals and video tutorials, attempting to explain most of its features — a list that grows and grows, to the point that the most complex systems out there have multiple HUDs.

I'm obviously talking about the crème de la crème items on the market — coming from the creators of Bento mesh bodies and especially heads — which sport the most complex and thorough set of configuration possibilities, literally layers upon layers of things you can do with your item, all of which fully scripted, and being able not only to interface with your HUD, but also with the HUDs of others — so long as you have them properly configured, of course. And some of them play nicely with your animation overriders, and vice-versa, animation overriders can also 'talk' to your items and 'make' them 'do things' (think couples dances, hugging & kissing, and so forth).

The proliferation of different Bento mesh bodies & heads (even if there is a clear market dominance of a few) means that content creators working with apparel and avatar accessories will need to support all those different types — or, at least, all those who dominate the market. Shoppers, on the other hand, need to figure out which kind of content they're supposed to buy for their avatars — and understand why something designed specifically for one type of mesh body will very likely not work on a different type. You have to learn to deal with mesh, rigged mesh, and fitted mesh — and understand which one is appropriate for your particular mesh body. Also, you need to understand that most content creators will expect their customers to know what they're supposed to be buying. Fortunately for us consumers, it's customary to sell multiple meshes (for the different body types) as a single item, so that, when you switch mesh bodies, you can still continue to use your favourite item of clothing. But... sometimes, it's not obvious to figure out which is which. If a merchant sells an item labelled as "Maitreya only" what exactly does that mean? Oh wait, Maitreya just has one female body, right? Wait, no, there are two... there is Lara, and there is Lara Petite. Will they work with the same type of clothing? And now there is also a new Lara, Lara X, which is not compatible with the "old" Lara, but every existing Maitreya customer is entitled to get the Lara X for free, so the content creator can assume that "Maitreya" means "one of the two, just pick the correct body type when using this dress"? What about, uh, Lara X Petite? And there is also the free and open source Ruth 2.0 project, which nobody uses (except on OpenSimulator-based grids, where there is nothing else), but which is sort of compatible with the original Maitreya Lara, but not with the Lara X...

That's cool — the content creator says — but you have a Lara mesh body, you also have a Lara X mesh body, so I only need to include one of those in my vendor. It's, well, just "Maitreya" for me. You, the buyer, just need to make sure you're using the right mesh body. Aye, that's all very fine, but what about all the former content which I have, predating the Lara X, and which will work only with the "original" Lara? Some apparel designers are kind and generous and willing to give you an additional Lara X-compatible version of their items, also for free — but this is neither widespread, nor even mandatory. The reverse, however, is not true, i.e. there are lots of content creators doing their designs only for the Lara X, and refuse to do it for the Lara (this has mostly to do with the style of their apparel, which will work only well with the oversized hips & bottom and those meshes that are specifically designed to allow them).

Note that this "size mess" is not new. When mesh became popular, content creators sort of agreed to do five meshes in different sizes, so you could pick what would fit your avatar's shape best. Only, like in real life, the measurements were not really a standard, and each content creator had their own ideas of what a "size S" or "size XL" was. In most cases, since you got all five sizes packed into the delivery box or HUD, you could just experiment and see what fitted your avatar best — not unlike what we do iRL when we're unsure about the sizing used by a brand we're not familiar with. But, well, it wasn't exactly easy. With full Bento meshes, things are a bit easier in that regard — just to be more complex on other areas!

I trace this whole sizing issue back to the days when Tinies began to be popular (requiring special skeleton-deforming animation overriders) — around 2005. It was conjectured that this "fad" would not last long, because all content had to be redesigned to fit Tinies. That, however, didn't happen. Famously talented top content creator Damien Fate launched their "Loco Pocos" line of cuddly Tinies, which were actually very reasonably priced (for the time), because he hoped to make some real money selling all the clothing and accessories that he made for those Tinies — and sold in (almost) exclusivity through his shop. Such concepts were seen as not having a future... but here we are, almost two decades later, and while "Loco Pocos" has been long gone from SL, Tinies continue to be around, have their own body meshes, and specialised clothing, furniture, vehicles, houses etc.— all made specifically for them. So, as a buyer, you have to be sure you get the content which is appropriate for your avatar, and learn (sometimes the hard way!) what kinds will not work together at all (or only very, very badly).

All right. Anyone who is reading this is familiar with all the above, and much more. At the time of writing, Firestorm was still alpha-testing the new renderer (the one that works with PBR Materials), and since that's the most-used viewer to connect to the SL Grid, content creators have been reluctantly releasing some of their more recent items with the ability of using PBR materials as well. Most SL residents cannot notice any difference — only those sticking to the Official SL Viewer will get that awesome experience — but it's fair to say that content creators have been preparing for this dramatic change since late summer 2023. And that, in turn, means new things to learn to configure; new HUD options or even new HUDs; new content overall, which might get revamped and more sophisticated, and more difficult to configure; and so forth.

Consider all the above and think of all aspects of the daily usage of Second Life which consists in selecting the correct overall configuration for your avatar. I mean, it's not just point and click, or drag item X on top of your avatar — as we used to do when clothes were just a texture, showing in Inventory with obvious, easy-to-identify, coloured icons.

"Configuring your avatar" — playing dress up, if you wish — is, today, an exercise in complexity beyond belief, and it just gets worse and worse with each new generation of content that gets released.

... and you're still questioning why new residents "don't get" the inventory...?

Second Life, these days, has very likely the most complex user interface ever designed for a 3D virtual world environment — a design which Is not "imposed" upon us by Linden Lab, but rather by the community of residents themselves. LL is to blame for many things (notably for the way they do not allow us to change the item'd ico

[Modulated]

19 minutes ago, Gwyneth Llewelyn said:

Look, the whole process of acquiring items for your avatar to wear is insane.

It draws from so many different sources...

For instance: as soon as LL comes up with some technical innovation, content creators turn it into fantastic things. However, that isn't always straightforward.

In the ancient days, LL thought that they could get away with merely having painted textures on top of avatars. Okay, so, well, people wanted to wear jackets over T-shirts over their underwear... so, LL introduced many 'clothing layers' and changed the viewer technology to pre-bake your avatar's 'whole texture' (actually, three — head, top, bottom) and send it to everybody else, as opposed to sending all the textures separately, and allow each viewer to bake it independently (which didn't work that well).

Then we started getting transparencies — of two different kinds. Then LL toyed with the idea of having materials (we had about a dozen or so) but abandoned the plan. By this time, people were already wearing prim shoes and prim hair — because you simply couldn't do anything very realistic by just painting textures over your body. Prim clothing brought a bit more tridimensionality to clothes, but it also meant that avatars were starting to wear things constantly, which was not quite what LL originally had in mind.

Obviously, I don't know what these ideas were, but you can get some hints from very early movies of SL. It's clear that "valid attachments" were things like weapons or a jetpack or any kind of discardable items, to be used in some sort of "experience" or "adventure" or "game" or... whatever... but not exactly something that was supposed to be permanent.

Still, that's what people started doing — 'permanent attachments' which were used, well, as part of your body or your clothing. Which, in turn, meant that you would now have items in your inventory that were yellow cubes but were not 'regular objects', but rather 'clothing' as well. That started to become... confusing.

And from there, we jump to flexiprims, to rigid sculpties, to mesh (in its many variants!), and, ironically, 'bake on mesh', which is sort of how it all began... but on a completely different avatar body!

All of that is now spread across over inventory, of course, and it's all small yellow cubes. You just need to figure out how to set them apart from, well, objects. It's a bit easier if you read & write English with some fluency, of course, since the vast majority of items will be labeled in English.

Okay. Now that's the positive part, so to speak: content creators incorporating new technology into their creations, and doing more and more things that LL never even remotely dreamed about.

Then we have the dark side.

These are all the very complex tricks that content creators have to come up with to deal with technical limitations imposed by LL — for whatever reason — and figure out ways of working around those limitations.

Here is an example: buying things. The way it was designed to work was simply to put your items inside a prim and set it to sell its contents on touch. Easy, right? The problem is that if you have dozens of items to sell — and each in different colours, too! — that's a lot of prims, and that's a lot of tier to be paid. Therefore, vendors became popular very early on, because you could just use 2-3 prims and let customers search through all your clothes.

Unlike selling a prim's content — which does not require any scripting at all — vendors are slightly more complex items. They need a bit of scripting to shuffle textures around and deliver the item currently selected after receiving a confirmation of payment. And here the problems start: while, script-wise, you do get a special event confirming that a payment was made, as well as showing up on your transaction logs, and you can then proceed to send an item to the buyer (because you know you've received payment!), you cannot know if the item was ever delivered.

In fact, once the item is sent to the buyer, you don't have any more information about what happened. The buyer might have crashed, and the payment went through — but they never received the item. Or they might have a very cluttered screen (most of us do), and fails to click on the dialogue box to accept the item (and it times out). Or you might simply click on the wrong button for whatever reason, cancelling the delivery. Or... well, you can see how tricky this is, so many things can go wrong.

All that could have been avoided if LL added just a line of code to confirm that someone received the item!

So, what did content creators do? They devised this two-step (and currently three-step) mechanism to guarantee that you really got the item. First, you receive a box, which started as being styled as a "gift box" which you dropped on the ground to unpack. Besides the cuteness of the experience, the important thing is that, once that gift box is rezzed, the script inside can immediately notify the merchant who sold it — they now know that their item was delivered, and was delivered to the right person, and they have it in their inventory (so, they can complain, but the merchant knows that they cannot complain that they didn't get anything!).

Dropping boxes on the ground meant owning your own land, or using a public sandbox, or, well, some very brave merchants even allowed customers to temporarily rezz their boxes on the floor of their shops — but, naturally enough, griefers immediately abused that, by bringing their scripted griefing tools with them and creating havoc. So — either you had your own place (and that meant you couldn't even test whatever you've bought until much later...), or you went to a public sandbox, avoiding griefers left and right, just to get your little item out of the box.

And at the end you'd get two yellow cubes in your inventory — one was the box, the other was the actual item you've bought. With luck, the content creator had thought well in advance and made it clear which is which. Some, however, just named the item inside with the same name as the gift box. Confusing. You'd delete the wrong one — or kept both, just in case, and were constantly attaching the box to your avatar's head, not the item you bought. So confusing!

Later, this was slightly improved with the "shop bag" kind of idea, i.e. instead of rezzing a prim, you'd attach the prim to your avatar. That works as well (and technically you can even use the same script for both cases, so if someone rezzed the handbag in a sandbox instead of attaching it, they would still be able to get the item inside), but with two catches. Some misguided content creators required the "shop bag" to be touched to activate it (as opposed to immediately sending you the item when you attached it). This is usually okay... unless the item gets wrongly attached somehow, and you cannot see where the bag is (maybe it's upside down, floating over your head or under your feet, or even rezzed inside your avatar's body). You might now need to be an expert in turning the camera around just so in order to find where exactly the bag is and touch it on where it's supposed to be touched (sometimes it's just part of the bag that can be touched... it all depends on the content creator's whim).

The second catch is that formerly you could just attach one item per attachment point, and that meant that if you were extremely unlucky with the choice of attachment points, you could wear the bag and lose your clothes — or part of them — and it wouldn't be immediately obvious what went wrong — or, worse, you might not even see what was 'displaced' by the bag and cannot remember what you had there before.

Not to mention that, on laggy areas, buyers might not see the box or bag being rezzed, and so rightfully complained to the merchant, who had a confirmation of delivery and therefore might not be very willing to replace the item (or perhaps have no time to answer technical support questions related to the user interface...).

Also... everybody would know what you have bought by just looking at the box or bag. That's fine if you buy a plain vanilla piece of clothing. But perhaps you're not that fond of showing off that you've just bought the latest 'sex toy' for your private dungeon. No privacy!

Confusing? Aye, quite so. It only gets worse, of course.

Content creators then realised that, in order to avoid boxes not being rezzed, the easiest way would be simply to send people a HUD, and — hopefully — add some short explanation of what to do with it (i.e. "wear me to unpack").

Cool — no more privacy issues for sure, and no need to worry about where that attachment went. But it also meant that, unless you know what to expect, all of a sudden you might get a huge prim blocking your view which you haven't a clue about (since content creators will use the highest-resolution textures they can, and that means these will take time to rezz — and be just a very blurry obstruction on your vision during that time). It might also displace one of your favourite HUDs, too, making things even more confusing.

But now the horrible mess really starts. Very early on, content creators figured out that if they placed scripts in their items, these could be used to enable lots of interesting things. For example, heels could be scripted to play sounds; clothes could change colour; bracelets could be resized without the need for selling them with modify permissions. That was cool in itself, but what was even cooler, was the ability to also script the items to inform the merchant that they weren't merely delivered (which you got from the HUD attachment), but actually used (which you got when attaching the bought item to your avatar). Not to mention, of course, whatever other metrics the merchant would be interested in — but let's not go that way!

Initially, those items would be programmed/configured using text chat commands — first in public chat (argh!), later on private channels — but they were sort of awkward to use (if I got L$1 for every time someone typed /ao on in public chat or even on group chat...). Content creators moved on to complex dialogue boxes instead, but, due to the extreme limitations (and awful aesthetics) of those, they quickly moved on to... HUDs.

HUDs, mind you, are a tribute to the imagination, creativity, and technical prowess of content creators. Most of them (and there are tons of varieties!) work really well, they work all the time with next-to-zero bugs, and they get more complex every day. Some have extensive manuals and video tutorials, attempting to explain most of its features — a list that grows and grows, to the point that the most complex systems out there have multiple HUDs.

I'm obviously talking about the crème de la crème items on the market — coming from the creators of Bento mesh bodies and especially heads — which sport the most complex and thorough set of configuration possibilities, literally layers upon layers of things you can do with your item, all of which fully scripted, and being able not only to interface with your HUD, but also with the HUDs of others — so long as you have them properly configured, of course. And some of them play nicely with your animation overriders, and vice-versa, animation overriders can also 'talk' to your items and 'make' them 'do things' (think couples dances, hugging & kissing, and so forth).

The proliferation of different Bento mesh bodies & heads (even if there is a clear market dominance of a few) means that content creators working with apparel and avatar accessories will need to support all those different types — or, at least, all those who dominate the market. Shoppers, on the other hand, need to figure out which kind of content they're supposed to buy for their avatars — and understand why something designed specifically for one type of mesh body will very likely not work on a different type. You have to learn to deal with mesh, rigged mesh, and fitted mesh — and understand which one is appropriate for your particular mesh body. Also, you need to understand that most content creators will expect their customers to know what they're supposed to be buying. Fortunately for us consumers, it's customary to sell multiple meshes (for the different body types) as a single item, so that, when you switch mesh bodies, you can still continue to use your favourite item of clothing. But... sometimes, it's not obvious to figure out which is which. If a merchant sells an item labelled as "Maitreya only" what exactly does that mean? Oh wait, Maitreya just has one female body, right? Wait, no, there are two... there is Lara, and there is Lara Petite. Will they work with the same type of clothing? And now there is also a new Lara, Lara X, which is not compatible with the "old" Lara, but every existing Maitreya customer is entitled to get the Lara X for free, so the content creator can assume that "Maitreya" means "one of the two, just pick the correct body type when using this dress"? What about, uh, Lara X Petite? And there is also the free and open source Ruth 2.0 project, which nobody uses (except on OpenSimulator-based grids, where there is nothing else), but which is sort of compatible with the original Maitreya Lara, but not with the Lara X...

That's cool — the content creator says — but you have a Lara mesh body, you also have a Lara X mesh body, so I only need to include one of those in my vendor. It's, well, just "Maitreya" for me. You, the buyer, just need to make sure you're using the right mesh body. Aye, that's all very fine, but what about all the former content which I have, predating the Lara X, and which will work only with the "original" Lara? Some apparel designers are kind and generous and willing to give you an additional Lara X-compatible version of their items, also for free — but this is neither widespread, nor even mandatory. The reverse, however, is not true, i.e. there are lots of content creators doing their designs only for the Lara X, and refuse to do it for the Lara (this has mostly to do with the style of their apparel, which will work only well with the oversized hips & bottom and those meshes that are specifically designed to allow them).

Note that this "size mess" is not new. When mesh became popular, content creators sort of agreed to do five meshes in different sizes, so you could pick what would fit your avatar's shape best. Only, like in real life, the measurements were not really a standard, and each content creator had their own ideas of what a "size S" or "size XL" was. In most cases, since you got all five sizes packed into the delivery box or HUD, you could just experiment and see what fitted your avatar best — not unlike what we do iRL when we're unsure about the sizing used by a brand we're not familiar with. But, well, it wasn't exactly easy. With full Bento meshes, things are a bit easier in that regard — just to be more complex on other areas!

I trace this whole sizing issue back to the days when Tinies began to be popular (requiring special skeleton-deforming animation overriders) — around 2005. It was conjectured that this "fad" would not last long, because all content had to be redesigned to fit Tinies. That, however, didn't happen. Famously talented top content creator Damien Fate launched their "Loco Pocos" line of cuddly Tinies, which were actually very reasonably priced (for the time), because he hoped to make some real money selling all the clothing and accessories that he made for those Tinies — and sold in (almost) exclusivity through his shop. Such concepts were seen as not having a future... but here we are, almost two decades later, and while "Loco Pocos" has been long gone from SL, Tinies continue to be around, have their own body meshes, and specialised clothing, furniture, vehicles, houses etc.— all made specifically for them. So, as a buyer, you have to be sure you get the content which is appropriate for your avatar, and learn (sometimes the hard way!) what kinds will not work together at all (or only very, very badly).

All right. Anyone who is reading this is familiar with all the above, and much more. At the time of writing, Firestorm was still alpha-testing the new renderer (the one that works with PBR Materials), and since that's the most-used viewer to connect to the SL Grid, content creators have been reluctantly releasing some of their more recent items with the ability of using PBR materials as well. Most SL residents cannot notice any difference — only those sticking to the Official SL Viewer will get that awesome experience — but it's fair to say that content creators have been preparing for this dramatic change since late summer 2023. And that, in turn, means new things to learn to configure; new HUD options or even new HUDs; new content overall, which might get revamped and more sophisticated, and more difficult to configure; and so forth.

Consider all the above and think of all aspects of the daily usage of Second Life which consists in selecting the correct overall configuration for your avatar. I mean, it's not just point and click, or drag item X on top of your avatar — as we used to do when clothes were just a texture, showing in Inventory with obvious, easy-to-identify, coloured icons.

"Configuring your avatar" — playing dress up, if you wish — is, today, an exercise in complexity beyond belief, and it just gets worse and worse with each new generation of content that gets released.

... and you're still questioning why new residents "don't get" the inventory...?

Second Life, these days, has very likely the most complex user interface ever designed for a 3D virtual world environment — a design which Is not "imposed" upon us by Linden Lab, but rather by the community of residents themselves. LL is to blame for many things (notably for the way they do not allow us to change the item'd ico

The inventory system is not that complicated but thank you for your nearly book size post. 😁

[Arielle Popstar]

18 minutes ago, Gwyneth Llewelyn said:

Look, the whole process of acquiring items for your avatar to wear is insane.

~~much insanity and lack of foresight by LL~~

... and you're still questioning why new residents "don't get" the inventory...?

Second Life, these days, has very likely the most complex user interface ever designed for a 3D virtual world environment — a design which Is not "imposed" upon us by Linden Lab, but rather by the community of residents themselves. LL is to blame for many things (notably for the way they do not allow us to change the item'd ico

Thank you Gwyneth, never seen it so well explained how we got to where we are and validate that SL is very complex and becoming even more so. A small quibble about your thoughts on Opensim but it isn't relevant for the main thrust of your post.

Lack of foresight and planning by LL I see now as to why we are where we are at.

[Arielle Popstar]

6 minutes ago, Modulated said:

The inventory system is not that complicated but thank you for your nearly book size post. 😁

It is horrendously complex for anyone who either only changes once a year or makes it a full time job to follow all the updates.

[Modulated]

5 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

It is horrendously complex for anyone who either only changes once a year or makes it a full time job to follow all the updates.

It is not.  It is basic, yes, but not complicated. Let's not conflate those 2 things.

[Arielle Popstar]

Just now, Modulated said:

It is not.  It is basic, yes, but not complicated. Let's not conflate those 2 things.

Then perhaps you didn't fully comprehend what Gwyneth wrote or just use a system avatar? It is not basic and it is complicated and increasing by the day in my experience. Every new body and every update on heads requires relearning, practice and remembering all the different variables needed for dressing of the average female avatar. Not familiar with male ones so maybe that is easier as they don't require makeup and stuff.

 

[Modulated]

9 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Then perhaps you didn't fully comprehend what Gwyneth wrote or just use a system avatar? It is not basic and it is complicated and increasing by the day in my experience. Every new body and every update on heads requires relearning, practice and remembering all the different variables needed for dressing of the average female avatar. Not familiar with male ones so maybe that is easier as they don't require makeup and stuff.

 

Yeah its my comprehension skills. /s And no it's not complicated. Let's go round and round . lol They all attach and wear the same, you don't have to relearn basic inventory functions.

Edited March 26 by Modulated

[Arielle Popstar]

1 minute ago, Modulated said:

Yeah its my comprehension skills. /s And no it's not complicated. Let's go round and round . lol

Don't know in what way you use the inventory or how you dress but my experience is that it is every bit as complicated as Gwyneth lays out. I have 5 different bodies and each has it quirks and gotchas whether in the body or hud. Heads are even more so to where I now stick with one type because to switch to different creators requires too much effort if I am to have any time left over to actually socialize instead of spending all my time learning about the avatars. That doesn't include all the clothes and accessories I have to wear to make reasonably presentable avatar. Then on top of that there is all the building content which I don't bother with because it is just too much and overwhelming to add to it.

[Persephone Emerald]

7 minutes ago, Modulated said:

It is not.  It is basic, yes, but not complicated. Let's not conflate those 2 things.

Yes, it is complicated, but we're used to it, so it doesn't seem that difficult to us.

It's kind of like knowing how to drive a car. There are all different kinds of cars. Some are automatic drive. Some are stick-shift. Some have automatic window controls. Some have crank handles for the windows. Some have the fuel inlet on the right. Some have it on the left. Some use diesel fuel, some use petrol, some can use petrol with grain alcohol in it, some can run on used fryer oil, some can run on an electric battery, some can only run with an electric battery. 

All these differences don't even take into account where all the controls are, what kind of tires the car might use, how to adjust the mirrors, and how it feels when you're driving it. Once you've been driving your own car for awhile, these things become second nature (like one's viewer of choice or their favorite mesh body), but if you get a new car or need to drive someone else's, it takes a little while to get comfortable again.

[Modulated]

1 minute ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Don't know in what way you use the inventory or how you dress but my experience is that it is every bit as complicated as Gwyneth lays out. I have 5 different bodies and each has it quirks and gotchas whether in the body or hud. Heads are even more so to where I now stick with one type because to switch to different creators requires too much effort if I am to have any time left over to actually socialize instead of spending all my time learning about the avatars. That doesn't include all the clothes and accessories I have to wear to make reasonably presentable avatar. Then on top of that there is all the building content which I don't bother with because it is just too much and overwhelming to add to it.

Just because it does not work the way you think it should does not make it complicated, you do realize that?  Anyway, this is beating a dead horse territory now.

[Persephone Emerald]

Some people drive a horse and buggy.

[Arielle Popstar]

4 minutes ago, Modulated said:

Just because it does not work the way you think it should does not make it complicated, you do realize that?  Anyway, this is beating a dead horse territory now.

Doesn't matter how I think it should work but that is does work that way and that some of us feel it is inordinately complex. If the Lab would set some suggestions and guideline and maybe set some limitations on creators it could be much simpler.

[Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia]

This is a much bigger problem than SL's inventory window.  Generation Z has problems conceptualizing file and folder heirarchies.  According to this Verge article (from 2022), it started around 2017.  My sister is an educator, and she says the problem is getting worse as years go by.  Just another example of the education system failing to educate.

[Rowan Amore]

18 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

I have 5 different bodies and each has it quirks and gotchas whether in the body or hud. Heads are even more so to where I now stick with one type because to switch to different creators requires too much effort if I am to have any time left over to actually socialize instead of spending all my time learning about the avatars. That doesn't include all the clothes and accessories I have to wear to make reasonably presentable avatar. Then on top of that there is all the building content which I don't bother with because it is just too much and overwhelming to add to it.

But that's the bodies and heads, not the inventory which is what Modulated was talking about.

31 minutes ago, Modulated said:

They all attach and wear the same, you don't have to relearn basic inventory functions.

 

[Love Zhaoying]

11 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

But that's the bodies and heads, not the inventory which is what Modulated was talking about.

43 minutes ago, Modulated said:

They all attach and wear the same, you don't have to relearn basic inventory functions.

I wonder how many bodies and heads you can wear at the same time?

[Arielle Popstar]

2 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

But that's the bodies and heads, not the inventory which is what Modulated was talking about.

 

They are in my inventory and don't all attach the same or have the same parts or features. I have bento bodies, bom bodies. Same with heads. They each require different accessories or how I apply the makeup, or the eep setting that is best. They are not always interchangeable because there are certain accessories or makeup's that I prefer for certain looks which are only in the appliers in which case I need the bento head or body but not the bom. I can think of a number of examples similar in my outfits where basic functions are different now but I need to revert to an older one to achieve the look I want.

[Rowan Amore]

Right click/add. Right click/detach. Works for every head or body I've owned.  It's still not a basic inventory issue but a creator issue and how each creator packages their product.  With Legacy, you have to remember that hands and feet are separate attachments.  Not an inventory issue.  In fact, most of what you mentioned is NOT an inventory issue.  If you can't make a simple file for EvoX makeup with sub folders for eyeshadow, lipstick, etc...that's YOUR inventory issue.

How everything goes on and in what order and on which head...not an inventory problem.

[Solar Legion]

I use two bodies (tried oh so many in the past) and due to the nature of my forms, oh so many different heads, tails and other parts.

If you are having trouble with just the one body, head and a selection of clothing then I honestly do not know what I can say about that and remain withn guidelines.

Oh yes - it was not any easier in years past either, not back before Mesh Bodies. Back then you had to deal with even MORE if you weren't using a Human form.

[Arielle Popstar]

5 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

Right click/add. Right click/detach. Works for every head or body I've owned.  It's still not a basic inventory issue but a creator issue and how each creator packages their product.  With Legacy, you have to remember that hands and feet are separate attachments.  Not an inventory issue.  In fact, most of what you mentioned is NOT an inventory issue.  If you can't make a simple file for EvoX makeup with sub folders for eyeshadow, lipstick, etc...that's YOUR inventory issue.

How everything goes on and in what order and on which head...not an inventory problem.

Yeah but you're now having to split hairs to prove a point and ignoring that there is Evox and Evo. Evo will fit other heads to some degree, Evox will fit some newer heads that have the proper licensing. Bom and the older bodies require different accessories and alpha's to work properly. Never mind the bodies that have the switchable Bom versions and on and on it goes. There is a lot more to it then just Legacy needing the feet added. Maybe the difference is between those of us who still use their older outfits and those who use the most modern clothing, bodies and accessories.

[Rowan Amore]

2 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Yeah but you're now having to split hairs to prove a point and ignoring that there is Evox and Evo. Evo will fit other heads to some degree, Evox will fit some newer heads that have the proper licensing. Bom and the older bodies require different accessories and alpha's to work properly. Never mind the bodies that have the switchable Bom versions and on and on it goes. There is a lot more to it then just Legacy needing the feet added. Maybe the difference is between those of us who still use their older outfits and those who use the most modern clothing, bodies and accessories.

Still nothing whatsoever to do with inventory but ok.

Edited March 26 by Rowan Amore

[Love Zhaoying]

I have an idea, if people used..outfits!